When the media kept reporting that the shooter at the Virginia Tech campus was "suspected/probably" a Chinese student, I couldn't help but think of Chen Shizheng's "Dark Matter." The film tells the story of a Chinese student who shot a teacher and classmate on campus. The film claims to be based on real events. Which event? There is no description in the movie, so as not to limit the creative space. But as long as you check it, you know that the movie is based on the "Lu Gang incident" that happened at the University of Iowa. Lu Gang was born in the Department of Physics of Peking University and entered the Department of Astronomy in Iowa in 1985 as a graduate student. On Halloween in 1991, Lu Gang systematically shot six people at different locations on campus, including his thesis advisor, his advisor's assistant, another Chinese student in the same department, the dean of the Department of Astronomy, A vice-chancellor of the university, and a female student who works part-time as a secretary in the school office. Except for the last female student who was seriously injured and paralyzed, all the other five people died. Lu Gang finally went to a room and swallowed a gun. A year after the Lu Gang incident, some writers published reportage novels that were controversial. Later, mainland writer Su Tong turned the incident into a TV series. Because it was a TV drama broadcast on the mainland, it even made the ending of the story so clean that there was no final shooting tragedy. More than ten years after the incident, the director Chen Shizheng, who played Huagu and stage plays, is still very happy to make a new version. "Dark Matter" was shot in high-definition digital and is the main movie of the "Indie Trend/Indie Power" unit. Although it is a self-made film, the production conditions are the envy of mainstream films. The protagonist has Liu Ye as a doctoral student who studies dark matter, and a rich wife who loves Chinese culture, played by Mery Streep. Streep) to play. It is said that Liu Ye and Zhang Zhen competed for the film during the casting. Both male stars hope to break into the Hollywood market by playing opposite Meryl Streep. Although "Dark Matter" has first-class professional actors and skilled shooting techniques, the story and characters presented are very thin and stereotyped. The Chinese students in the movie are all laughable fools. For example, for free buffet meals and sightseeing tours, they swarmed to church activities. I thought this was the early days of Hong Kong’s port opening, when missionaries distributed milk powder to preach. Chinese people can make a movie that makes Chinese people reflect or even laugh at themselves, but the director deliberately magnifies the various faux pas of the Chinese people in the United States, making people feel that all Chinese students are out of tune with the local society and have their own strange appearances, even I deliberately created a character who sympathized with the Chinese for Meryl Streep to play, but I just thought it didn't make sense. Such a film may satisfy the tastes of foreign audiences, but in this way, it reinforces the audience's inherent prejudice against Chinese students, which is why I can't appreciate or even hate "Dark Matter".
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